


whose dwellers rave

by gogollescent



Category: The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-09
Updated: 2017-12-31
Packaged: 2018-04-30 18:28:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 8,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5174591
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tolkien shortfic imported from Tumblr for my own devious purposes. Latest chapters: Manwë/Morgoth, Sauron gets DIFFERENTLY crunk</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Elwing, "secret"

When word came, far too late, of wolves in the wood, Dior took off the Nauglamír. 

Galadriel argued with him. She said the jewel might be the best protection Menegroth’s king could now call to account. He had been wise to withhold it—wise in all things to deny them—but he was not wise to keep it from himself.

“Let the jewel guard one with less devoted counsellors,” Dior said. He saw anger grip her face like pain: it was painful, perhaps, to have pride enough that you shuddered at such barbs. Even with your cousins bearing down at the head of an army. She cared very much for his family. For him, by extension. He didn’t doubt her.

Yet blessings or the need of them weren’t what he’d thought of when his hand found the catch. The Silmaril had been his last inheritance: after beauty, a kingdom, Beren’s sword. When the green-lord came, bearing the coffer gingerly—the Laegrim never loved the jewel; they tolerated it, because it disclosed Lúthien’s face to the blindest among them in sycophantic detail—when he came, Dior had thought that he brought something stained. Some blood, some evidence. But the Silmaril was free of fault. It had grown strangely clear since he first saw it by the Ascar. His hand’s color was planted, then well-tended, in the depths. What he remembered thinking, in the silence that succeeded the gift—the only noise, the running footsteps of a fountain—was that they were wrong who said that it had aged his mother. It was a stone. It reminded him of her.

He wouldn’t wear it to battle. Fëanor’s oath was a sickness. Let them descend into the matrix of Thingol’s greater jewel; let disappointment flood them, and let them gorge on lack. When they had bled awhile, even they might prefer the curelessness of the world above to the caves. They had been sick for many years.

Outside the nursery, Galadriel’s words sounded again in his mind, rising and falling out of nowhere like a piece of dogged music. The necklace back in its iron coffer had a heft it had never admitted to, when worn: a living want of balance. He knocked once. When the door opened, he asked Elwing’s minder to leave them, and the woman smiled. 

Nimloth was with the twins. She knew what he intended, though for the moment he felt alone. 

Then his daughter crept from behind one of Melian’s tapestries, and he knelt down out of his high imaginings to greet her. She was three that year, sly by the measure of an Elven-child: her blood betrayed finally in the precision of her gestures. He fussed without great interest at her thick black storm of hair, and lifted her onto a stool, leaving the coffer by its feet. She sat for him with obvious intention, fidgeting more from the effort of stillness than she would have at rest.

He opened the coffer. She said, “Oh!” as though relieved he had remembered.

“Shh,” he said, aware in the bold light of his new shadow, and of the chamber’s former gloom—gray gloom broken as ice above some deeper, darker water.

Protection; he hoped so. But he would have given it to her whether it brought with it great risk, or nothing. He settled the band around her neck, working not to snag her hair on any lesser stones, that sat in rows like spray atop old gold. The Nauglamír had once been made to flatter every wearer. It was constrained by the addition of the Silmaril, which could not shrink or grow to the tune of Dwarven magic. A gem the size of a fist, bumping that serious chin… But the enchantment remained; only it made her look like a songbird, body belled at the throat.


	2. Éowyn, "a kiss"

He takes her to Henneth Annûn three months after their marriage. Ithilien is almost clean, but they go garbed as rangers, escorted by rangers, enjoying a covertness that has as much to do with the summer sun as the hair-fine chance of orcs. They can travel at night, in the deep, clear evenings, as easily as by the lozenge-light of day; the moon has been returned to them. A silver lord new-ransomed, he smiles, not abashed.

Henneth Annûn reminds her of Rohan for no better reason than that the air is sweet and she can see for miles, through a veil. Height in a tumbled land like stillness in a flat one. The fall is noisy, a little insistent, hard to talk over—but not, they tell her, any louder than she was in the underbrush. (They are all very pleased to discover something that the Witch-king’s doom does ill. Having praised her outrageously where any man could listen, they feel a firm judicial need to pick at her in private. Faramir says, “You are the Lady of this land, and own its peace; therefore you can disturb it, whenever—” which oddly does not soothe.)

But here is uproar of another’s making. Music of stone, music of shape; music of snow that fought the sun! She sits so close to the water, the spray threatens her pipe. Of course Meriadoc sent pipeweed for the wedding, and she is growing fonder of it, now that Elessar’s been debarred from puffing at his councils. So many ways to make a king watch her mouth, and she never once considered “setting a fire near it.” Poor Aragorn! But he’ll do well, she knows. Amid riches he’ll learn to be deprived.

She has another task. Crashing through a garden—she learns, at times, to take.

Éowyn Dernhelm! What has she not seized? But still, it’s strange—it is different, to sit behind a bulwark of stone, and peer out at the plate of a flowering country. Held out to her, unwavering, in reach and very far; also it’s the flame that sits under her heart, identifiable by its color. The Window on the West: from gold to red.

“You’re brooding, then?” says Faramir. He comes and sets a board down next to her, probably their dinner. He’s trying to make a polite face at the swelling cloud of smoke.

Éowyn pulls the stem out showily, and turns to him wide-eyed. She's ready to claim that she can’t help but think of the sunset over Pelennor Fields. Théoden king— Faramir, to her chagrin, kisses her before she’s finished framing her sad tale. He might only have been waiting for an opening. His mouth is sweet from good wine, as hers can’t be; it’s calming too when he draws back, wrinkles his nose, comes again—she wraps a hand around his nape, dragging him forward until he’s nearly in her lap. He shivers, squirms, makes a late bid for freedom, and realizes that on the other side of her crossed legs is the brink. Then rears up. Faramir is always direct, once caged.

When her shoulders hit rock she thinks a little wistfully of a cool breeze, and the manageable pleasure of the pipe: the wood only as warm as her body, and that only where she had mouthed it. But Faramir is there. He straddles her thighs, heat that’s gathered through a lens. She can’t stop touching him. Or can, perhaps; can, could, at any moment writhe from under.


	3. Lúthien/Beren: "it's your turn."

_…fearing neither thirst nor hunger…_

The Nandor weren’t unfriendly—or never had been, in the thousand years before the Girdle curved her journeys, knotted questing into dance—but mortal tread they did not love; so Ossiriand stood empty, now she came on mortal feet. Also dark and dumb. If once she had seen past the star-tipped horizon, looking across leagues as she now would along her outstretched arm, to the flat hand and bright nails, intricate… But all her senses were strange. She heard so little, and a bird's call scared her. It thrust through her new heart’s tough walls.

When she was otherwise, all sound had been music. Out of every second she'd derive the next, its voice and tremor: she loved to finish a phrase on the ground’s behalf, and make flowers spring up. And now, now—she was so happy that she frequently expected it to be easy. But she had to listen, as though for secrets from a next-door chamber, and she traveled far enough through secret caves for a pure tone.

Beren was with her. He smiled without speaking. He had named her and bartered for her in the pits of Menegroth; and now, sometimes, he wiggled his eyebrows.

He also brought her a tuber. “Not fish?” she said hopefully, before remembering his vow.

“No need of ‘em,” he said. She was flat on her back in a brake of ferns, close to the water, and he sat down cross-legged beside her, using the withered end of the tuber to tickle her nose.

She sneezed. It was awful. Not as awful as it had been the first time, but bad enough. He kissed her tentatively while she was still blinking away tears, and left off again before she could do something about it, moved higher to lick her nose. She rose like a sentry, caught hold of his shoulders, and rolled them straight into the creek: which had been singing sidelong, in her ears.


	4. Túrin & Niënor, "what if they were crap Jedi"

“I’ve come to rescue you,” she said, wasting no time on introductions. Only later did it come out that she had forgotten her name.

That was fine. The Alliance had profited from the help of killers, heretics, and Hutts; the Alliance barely knew where to begin, when it came to taking a clean gift. But Túrin, who still dreamed of returning in shame to Thingol’s palace, even now that Doriath was a cloud of broken stone—Túrin knew. There were protocols for both silence and beauty. A curious child could go anywhere, if he asked no incorrect questions.

She adapted well to Brethil. He told himself she might have grown up on an ice planet—she was so fair—but she hated the cold, and though her reaction to the snow had been muted, less wryly adaptive than her reaction to _him_ , he caught her look of amazement at the water that tongued off an icicle, that first summer thaw. Her talents lay rather with managing in the face of deprivation; want of any sort was her old foe. Problems with supplies excited in her a fierce attention, and an evident pride, which had been nowhere to be found when they ran together through the den of the Worm.

Yes. Making herself so useful, maybe she had expected them all to forget—to forget what she’d pulled off on an X-wing and a prayer. And to forget that she echoed with a speaking emptiness: unpeopled courtyards, wild gardens, the wool of some discarded cloak, still warm…

He had more and more dreams of home. Níniel alighting on the lip of a fountain, standing again at his approach. Níniel wrapped in a shawl the Queen had programmed: nightingales ducking for red berries on the hem. It was enough that she stayed with them; it was enough that she cared for the cause. But he felt her like a thorn, in the Force. 

The sex probably didn’t help matters. “You’re very strong,” he said, one night when neither of them could sleep. They sat hip to hip on the end of the bed like children.

“I didn’t hurt you, did I?” she asked, apparently without sarcasm.

Her hands were in her lap and at the same time had been in his hair. _Her hands_ were more likely than cool air, his unstirred skin; it was really as though he was trying to hold a braiding of possible futures in his mind, the way Nellas had taught him. A memory and a promise: her stern palms. What was the weightless chance of the present against that? But he liked sitting near her, seeing how her head sank, her shoulders hunched. She worried about the Rebellion—well, it was worrying. But she had never known anything else. She’d never seen them strong, seen them hopeful. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt her kind of fear.

A few hours before she’d slid open the door to his cell, maybe. She woke up in a landing bay, she said. As though she was being born. But she had known she’d come there with a purpose.

He said, “Not that kind of strength. Let me show you.”

It went in a chest under his bed. He had set it aside, returned to it, and renamed it so often that he no longer felt the old circumspection toward the weapon. “You’ll have guessed this part,” he said, handing it to her. “It’s not…”

She thumbed it on. Sat for an instant in perfect stillness, the beam mining her hair for deep blue shadows, and then leapt to her feet, crying, “Hah!” She didn’t swing at air, as he would have, just held it a bare handspan from her nose, a torch against darkness too much clotted to beat back. Defiance was enough! In the light of the blade her eyes could have been any color, they were that close a match. She moved her weight from foot to foot and whirled back to him.

“Jedi,” she said, with such reluctant joy that Túrin knew no one had taught it to her. It was one of the things she had come with, one mad thing she had preserved.

He had meant to say, _It was my father’s_ , next, and then something else about blasters. But it would be like telling Húrin’s ghost, _It_ was _yours_. What had happened to her? Who had taken her hostage? She lowered the point until he could feel its heat through his collar; he thought then of what it would be to lunge forward—the wildness in her satisfied eyes, his heart bored through but spasming. There would be smoke instead of pain. He wouldn’t bleed, till he slipped farther down.


	5. Morwen, Túrin, "sharing a drink"

Had the war been won, or the battle not fought, he might now be his father’s cupbearer. Morwen did not think he would serve at Elu Thingol’s table. She saw no reason why he should: his manners had gone the way of her hands, roughening and faltering—strong, when they were strong, as a matter of habit, and not of fine control. When he sat before her, pale as a wolf cub, shadows set like hoofprints on each cheek, she wished she had told him his father was dead.

But if he had one virtue it was his memory for others’ words, though forgetting his own. Therefore she was silent while he poured wine into his cup. She had told him not to water it above half, and he glanced at her only once, pouring, for proof that he had done right. The gurgle of wine into water, like someone drinking, made it very silent, and reminded her of the likely chance that they were not alone. The bottom-heavy light of the garth at evening—the walls flushed and inviting, the torches brave, the thatch in pieces, the mountain black, the sky a blue without darkness, but which held down her head, knotted smooth fingers in her hair. She had for years taken such pride in the house that now, at signs of rot, she endured not grief but scorn, as though for a friend who had turned disloyal, and as though she had no part in its decay.

Túrin poured for her. Morwen drank, lowered the cup, and smiled when he gave a start, perhaps guessing by how she held it that it was empty. “We'll finish the wine,” she said. Indeed, they almost had. “That way, I will not forget, and make merry come winter, though my son is lost.”

Túrin nodded soberly. He tried to imitate her, and ended by spluttering and coughing. Wine dribbled from the corner of his mouth. She went to take the cup from him and he fiercely kept hold of it, jerking his head to one side, the great mouth of the vessel worn almost as a mask. 

He put it down at last, the dregs in it dark and almost solid. “I can’t,” he gasped, though he had. Perhaps he meant he would not pour again.

“Fine. Leave it,” she said, stroking his hair, and checking for dampness. The wine would dry sticky. “When you are gone, lost in the wild, I will drink one cup for you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Maybe this is the "parents saying goodbye to children they'll never see again" series? Maybe that's just "The Silmarillion"?


	6. Tuor/Idril, smoochies

Now where did she walk in Gondolin? not by the walls, where dreamers argued, lovers paraded, and musicians played to the wind, in case the mountains would give a fair critique; not in the palace, where her father sat and thought of ships. Not in the smithy where cousin Maeglin never forged an anchor. She liked gardens, and the fountains in gardens. She was to be seen lifting her legs over the wall of a well, to bathe her feet.

Tuor himself couldn’t resist the city walls, not least because he expected to see the ocean mount above the mountain-waves, and fill the valley, billowing, and writhe up from the foot of the Rock. But, forgetting his oath to Ulmo, he liked the green fields of Tumladen and the shadow of eagles gliding low, shadows which almost crawled, then raced, as Thorondor’s folk descended or drew level. On the other hand he couldn’t resist anywhere in Gondolin; he loved the palace, with its silence like a platter for birdsong, and metal trees the birds did not disdain—and the hot clamor of the Mole-house smithy made him itch to get in the way, regardless of how balefully the master begged his pardon. Once he met Idril in an in-between place, a steep gooseneck alley where the white clay produced stairs like a brow might wrinkle. Lines of washing crossed the sky and sketched gray lines of worry on her face, long jagged scars—Idril the outlaw. Propped on one hip, a great basket, and she kept her fist on the lid—but she smiled as though carrying nothing of weight, she met his eyes once, when she said his name, and then looked down and kept her smile. He felt compelled to look where she looked and convince her that he, too, had seen it; also, to stay looking at her face. “Where are you going? Would you like an entourage? I’m told I’m loud again as seven elves, so we will make a merry party.” What she had looked toward were a cluster of children, shooting marbles, which for mortal children on a hill would have been a sad game; the young elves sang pure notes, and the marbles shivered and returned.

“I am for the healers’ house. I have a victim for them.” She nodded him closer, and stepped under the wide eaves of a weaver’s shop. From inside, the thump of the loom; it made him think his pulse had quickened, less a beat than a trill. She wore no scent, but he smelled a cookfire, and cloth made hot by sun, out of the wind. She raised the wicker lid; in the basket dozed an adder, light dewing its scales.

“Venom for a poultice?”

“They’ll milk it, yes. And now I must be on my way.” Down went the lid. He opened his mouth to make a fast farewell, and she gave a shake of the head, still with that smile, and kissed him. She might not have done it if she had had the use of either hand; it was a method of retreat, and she lingered. He touched her cheek without understanding how he could, and when she leaned into his palm, brought up his other hand to touch her hair; she straightened and his hand was on her nape, full of her hair. She met his eyes in seriousness and sudden, pained attention. It seemed that she regarded him as she would have the view from the cliff.


	7. Curufin vs friendship

Curufin would have had to think to uncover a name. The musician was shy of him, unsociable, among the followers of the hunt considered something of a bully, which he knew because he had gotten complaints, and once had had to personally intervene over a question of a hound, wasting half an hour. She had never before produced the expression that now wrung her hard face: it lay somewhere between shame and pity, and it made her plain.

“Why did the hunt fail?”

Her report: A lady not of their company had appeared to claim the kill. It was her arrow in its breast, and so they ceded it to her. With her there had gone a child, a boy of ten or twelve years. The lady had been of the West, dressed all in white and with a face that blazed though she was brown; the child had the great black eyes of one of the Avari.

Because the musician was ill at ease, and her horn hung from her belt, Curufin heard the ghosts of the story’s participants under her voice, more strident than he supposed the lady or the huntsmen to have been in their speech together: they shouted, however, to be heard by the musician. Remember me!

“Did she give any message,” said Curufin, when the musician had described how they even helped the stranger dress the stag, and together with her son she had dragged it away, leaving a track a blind Man could have followed but which trust they judged it best not to abuse. But if he wished, lord—

“No. No messages?”

Silent a while. “I know his people of old,” said the musician, in an altered voice. “He keeps servants; he has his forge; but nothing like…” she swept her arm in the vague way of the Sindar, talking of the Noldor’s host, as if they did not now comprise half his active forces.

He stood up without meaning to, and had to make it look intentional—began gathering papers at random, and a knife to cut pages, and then, with disgust, set the papers down. “You may take your leave. Dismissed.” The musician hesitated. “Out, I said.” The name came: “Cíwen.”

Cíwen bowed, and knelt. The horn clacked at her waist. “She wore white,” she said, not rising, and then rose as though satisfied that she had won her point. All the while she had fidgeted, plucking at her sleeves, and now her fist went to her breast and, except that she had rocked up off her heels, she approached rectitude—yet really behaved as if almost alone, and rattled off with an ease not found save between old conspirators: “Yet none saw her till she left the trees’ shelter, for a shadow followed, not of her making, which cloaked her.” First he was concerned that she had taken his outburst for a commitment; then he saw she understood him well. There would be no assault. She turned and departed, and left the door to swing.

In fact he didn’t need the reminder that he was great, and Eöl weak. It was not that he was lately prey to homicidal impulses. It was that he knew it to be simple: slay an obstacle, and it would not rise to fight again, despite all warnings. As a youth he had supposed that shortcuts were an evil, that to weave the knot again was always wise; and his father had said, no, only a fool complicates what is easy, and never achieves the further marvel we have built from tricks. And so, sometimes, he wondered if he ought to kill, and save what he could. But what could he save? _She_ was his uncle’s child, after all; she might ride away without a word, and when the kinslayers said she had been trapped, a prisoner, she would deny everything. Also, the war was coming.

That thought should have settled his mind, and it did. He paced, he made sure of his resolve, and he walked to the window, carrying the knife. But he grew calm. Decision made, his answer given—then, at last, he longed to know that she was free. Already free, and far away—he didn’t imagine her shrinking, a white tendril on horseback; in his mind he stayed with her, saw the settlements recede. He clutched the knife and conjured Eöl, dying, with more death in him to mine—you could kill a man and maim his corpse. Now all wrongs were possible; they had crossed the sea.

And he wondered what she had named the boy.


	8. Celebrimbor the charming extrovert

Sauron sat very still. His eyes seemed to be vibrating.

“Mare’s milk!” Celebrimbor had crowed, when they went together to pick over the wagon train from Hadhodrond. “You’ve never had dwarvish spirits.” Sauron certainly had—both the mild, cheesy stuff he remembered from failed negotiations with Nogrod, and the reeking, transparent whey served after the talks—but a Maia of Aulë, he supposed, would have no reason for wariness. Celebrimbor insisted on purchasing a cask. Sauron, loaded down with trinkets, wondered if kicking it before them—rolling it all the way to the Guild—would improve the vintage.

But Celebrimbor condescended to carry it after only a fangless hint, and had remembered it therefore when they arrived at his underfurnished apartments. While Sauron began to sort through their purchases (loupes and jewels to examine through the loupes—an astrolabe and a compass which gave headings in a tinny voice, no doubt more useful underground), Celebrimbor disappeared into the pantry. The shallow porcelain dishes he brought back produced fresh memories of the _consistency_ of mare’s milk. Sauron toyed with the idea of giving himself a different tongue.

But he didn’t believe in a struggle against the stone grip of defeat. One waited until they let go. He sucked up milk from the little bowl, trying not to breathe through his nose, and licked the gummy dregs from his lip; and Celebrimbor didn’t explode into laughter, or bear the cask away. Instead he refilled both cups. He put his hands on his knees and gazed across the table, as though Sauron might yield and be more dramatically nonplussed.

And now—

“What,” said Sauron, “do I feel?”

Celebrimbor smiled, but it collapsed under the weight of that intent, unswerving stare. He had very dark eyes for a prince of the Noldor. “You tell me.”

“I can get drunk,” said Sauron, lecturingly; “this flesh is flesh, though subject to me. _This_ is not… drunk.”

“But it might be a closer approximation.” Celebrimbor picked up his own cup and tossed his hand as though to swirl the contents; the milk bulged and fell back. “You feel displaced, I think. How late is it, would you say? We came here at sunset, not yet sunset…”

“It’s _not_ dawn,” said Sauron, then blinked as hard as he could to rebuke his face, which wanted to melt. “Why does that sound like madness? How do I think the moon is full?”

The smile came creeping back. Not fragile, now, but too much to be dammed. “I wondered what that would be like. You have so many senses.”

Sauron had not drunk for several minutes. Now he wiped his mouth. “So,” he said, “this is a drink that knows when it was made. Is that it? Or knows some time, that hour ever—knows a world-state, and asserts it.”

“To me it’s like being tired,” said Celebrimbor, almost dreamy. “Very tired and awake, as in the case of whatever poor herdsman had to beat the skin all night. But I hypothesized that one of the Ainur, for whom to see and know are one word—as time is all the Song, to you, and can’t be played again—”

“It’s not so bad. I have it now.” But he didn’t; still his body said it was somewhere high up, pummeled by wind. He knew the truth, had known it, but that was half his trouble. The scrape of two locked visions, each keen-edged, was worse than drink’s brief dulling. He turned to face the window, using the table to lever himself around, and almost pitching forward onto the stacked cushions. He had in mind Lúthien; guttering flame that she was, in a chilled half-dead scrap of flesh, she hadn’t dealt in holy power, commanding the world—she had said to him, what do you want? While Huan drank his life’s blood, while Huan snuffled in his throat. What do you want? Do you want to die?

And why did he want this ability, to feel outside himself? For that was the truth. This dwarf magic, runes on a cask, this web could never hold him without his desire.

Celebrimbor’s hands made shapes for a while after Celebrimbor finished speaking. They were fair hands, strong and narrow; Celebrimbor was fairer than his forefathers, a smoothed-down ordered beauty, not so striking. Or was it the same face worn with unselfconscious naturalness? Whereas his father had always seemed to know his face was borrowed. Sauron had had that dead lord’s measure through the eyes of crows, but even from high up Curufin could be seen to swipe sharply at nothing, when he moved his hands. He used both arms to punctuate, absent his sword. When Celebrimbor pounded his palm, it was one of a flight of movements, jointed together with kindly gestures: his fist flowed open.

“It’s been months,” said Sauron. “Have I misunderstood? Should I change my form?”

“Oh—no, it’s not—you’re very fair, Annatar. You must forgive me. This was a strange test.” He took Sauron’s hand between his, and Sauron, still clutching the table, found himself freed at last from any feeling that he had Celebrimbor’s attention. In a musing drone, Celebrimbor said, “Do you ever forget who you are?“


	9. Beren, "masks"

He never disguised himself as an orc in Dorthonion; after a while his face and his mail and the ring became an advantage, for no reason he could discern, and in the first few years the brush hid him, the beasts spoke with his voice, and the lake where his father had died sang at night, to disguise the soundlessness that followed him—when his feet stopped making a heavy sound. When the king suggests it, he thinks with dread of the work of making masks from corpse-leather, and thinks with surprise of his dread; a year hasn’t washed away what the forest made of him, but it built a second skin around the armor. It made a flesh that thrills with fear or disgust, and trapped in it, he wonders at its warnings.

Finrod shakes his head. “We’ll take their armor, and their weapons. As for a mask—” 

He pokes the skin below Beren’s right eye, and mutters something, like a woman frustrated by the nap of her wool. Beren expects a song, or failing that, a terrible pain, but his face is just his face—thin and tender, in this wind.

Finrod says, “Look at the moon.”

White. It doesn’t burn. Nor does the light of Finrod’s gaze. “Did it work?” He tries to be as straightforward as he can. “I don’t feel anything.”

“No reason you should. I can change your seeming, I can’t make the light doubt you. But we’ll have to avoid the wayward one, to persuade lesser watchers,” says Finrod, whose face _has_ changed, but without any action on his part, as though a cloud moving off the moon and the stars could restore it. His eyes still gleam. “So drink your fill!”


	10. Nienor, "a clay kettle"

The kettle was in the shape of a persimmon. The blue glaze was duller than robin’s eggs, lighter than blueberries, but close to the mottled streakiness of berries, not as dry as the shine on an egg. Niënor investigated it like a blind woman, with hands and face: touching the base with the tips of her fingers, and holding the pot’s fat belly to her cheek.

“Won’t they miss it?”

“No. See? It’s cracked. They brought this fine thing with them, but the ones who came don’t know how to repair it.” That was possibly not true, but Brodda had fewer artisans in his service than Lorgan. 

“Had we finer things than this, before they came and plundered?”

“Surely,” said Aerin, who had carried the precious goods from Morwen’s house, one by one; those which Morwen had not pressed on Thingol’s heralds. “A cup for your father, silver and gold. Wood pitchers which Sador carved, with vine-handles and bulls’ heads.” Niënor’s smile grew doubtful. Sador often called her by the wrong name. Aerin said, “And lamps like fishing boats, by the man who taught Sador. And things of glass and cunning beasts invented by the elves.”

As always the mention of the elves soothed Niënor. Niënor interpreted “elves” as an adult’s way of telling her that all the speech that had gone before was false, and made to comfort her. Because she heard it that way, it was how Aerin used it. Yet the tale was true—once Morwen and Húrin had from Fingon the king an iron bird, that pecked.

“Beasts. Now I remember. But I like your fruit, aunt,” said Niënor, rubbing along the crack in the persimmon, and trying to hide as much as she could with one joint of one finger. Her brother would have said: _in giving it, you bring those other treasures back to me_. Her brother might have dropped the pot. Niënor sat with her back to the window, the shutter ajar, and leaking in green shade.


	11. Tuor/Idril/PTSD

Every night for three nights after the sack, he dreamed about his mother. Not true dreams, and surely now the sea had had him long enough to know: she had no face for her hair concealed it, and she ran through a spring-tipped forest, every stalk nodding under a spearhead of new green. He had been conceived in spring and she had died before spring came again. These calculations would have bored him, but he made them in the dream, saying to himself in amaze, this is all a dream! And generously, as a thief caught out, she opened her mouth and sang with the voice of the elves of Gondolin: who on festival night carried candles up and down the narrow streets, songs thus shaken and shining. She sang gladly, loudly, fearlessly as the dead of Gondolin, and lutes played from the cup of her mouth, and yet, because she was alive, he assumed she was frightened. 

The first night, he awoke with Idril’s head on his chest, and his heart or his hand’s grasp in her hair woke her; she said, “The watchers are dead,” meaning Morgoth’s eyes who the eagles had torn from their sockets, and flung into the valley. She sank down and set her face to his stomach, took a deep breath, and sneezed. 

Ëarendil said, “Shh!”

The second night left him tired. He hadn’t felt tired since he flung Maeglin from the wall. The refugees went two abreast on the pass, and he led them through chilly shade and into the furnace of the mountain’s exposed shoulder. The sun burned on his eyelids and lip, his neck, his back, and the skin of his scalp, raking smooth claws through his hair, and he gave thought to Glorfindel, face blackened by smoke. If Rían came, in whatever form—invented, mad, alive—that was a shield. The old hurt raised against the whip, the burning grief to come. What was he afraid of? Didn't he already grieve? Yes, but elsewhere; on the far side of the wall. He had prized his courage, and now he lay hidden in a house of marauders, hearing their revels. 

The third night, Idril had to rouse him. She didn’t look at him while shaking his shoulder, she continued to shake somewhat after he had opened his eyes; since the sack she watched her hands, and Ëarendil, and he was relieved not to deserve the same amused distrust. If she met his eye by chance she flinched, grew calm, and stayed. It was their only form of speech, except she always spoke to him—but as she would have spoken to herself, sternly relenting. 

That day they came close to the foot of the mountain, where the river winked in its green cleft; all along the trail they made were little falls and sunken pools, chattering and snorting. At one such, they stopped to drink, and Idril held Ëarendil’s hand to keep him from drinking too much, quickly, from the fall. Her white head gleamed, her dirty dress was more like skin than her wet skin, as though she had been beaten and given half-armor, like the slave soldiers of Dor-lómin. When Ëarendil gave up licking the water from his hand, she knelt by him, and whispered in his ear.

Tuor took Idril’s other arm. She stood, leaning on him. At that he began to feel less full, as though a weight of cold had slithered out without warning. His mother, alive, didn’t vanish; she slowed to a walk and stood still.


	12. Celebrimbor/Sauron, sic transit gloria mundi

“Here is what I have learned,” he said, “which my master never learned. Death is the cure. The One sent it, to end the work my master made. Eru has said you erred that dream of life; and all your life and red-gold wealth are but a tissue of the world when it was well, before the long sickness, and your arts prolong pain. Therefore all along you have served me; wherever they are, my rings serve me; give the Three up to me, and know me for your lord.”

Celebrimbor’s head lolled against the back of the chair. Celebrimbor never listened immediately; you could tell him whatever you liked, and, a day or a week or a century later, he would come to you as though the truth had been his own idea. The trick was to make a century pass for him in a instant; to take his head and turn it—and turn it—until the slack space between heartbeats waxed and became Time. Years enough to slake even his thirst.

But Sauron was afraid, he dreaded the Three, traveling far from him; hidden on the hand of some enemy, who would pass smiling into the green shade beneath green eaves. The white tower of Ost-in-Edhil overlooked a marble ruin: trees lay felled across broad boulevards, and teams of orcs dragged lone trees to the fires. Likewise, his fair form was a burden to him; he wanted to show Celebrimbor what followed—Celebrimbor to scratch out his own eyes, lacking whole hands to veil his face and fly from Sauron’s glory. But Celebrimbor, blinded by fear, would think he’d found his courage; witless, would forget how he was snared. Instead it seemed the clear eyes must blink. Alive, in a face that was swollen and blackened—the whites a dark red, like offal, and the light—

Here was a trace of the ancient fire, housed in rolling meat-gobbets. Celebrimbor, born within sight of the Trees, in Tirion on Túna: why end here? What a fool he’d been, not to go west.

Since he had stayed, he must listen. Sauron prepared to speak. If one could only accept it all, in its unquiet helplessness; the world in pain, that Eru pitied; the world which healed, that Morgoth hated. Then Arda need not die. It could be ordered, and bettered, though its blood would stain the lash, and it must work without respite to live. If he himself could remember that well, Celebrimbor would soon believe it. He tried to remember. What he felt was a hollow rage: he had waited and gotten no answer.

“I learned,” he said, “after Beleriand. The sea may cleanse—”

“You ruined Beleriand.”

“What?”

“You and your master. Remember. You set it on fire.”

“You aren’t a fool,” said Sauron, lying so he could think. “Beleriand? Of course you weren’t His servant, when you slaved to hold back time. What is music when time stops?”

Celebrimbor gave a great, explosive cough, and turned from the waist, far enough to spit. “Music?” he said vaguely, sounding spent, like he lay by Annatar in the cot they kept over the forge. “Can’t you hear it?”

The orcs were singing at their work.


	13. Morgoth's RING

Utumno had grown very dark; it must have, for his brother shone. Melkor raised his head to look more closely at the light. To his great amazement, it did not recede. He came at last from the line of a wingtip to his brother’s face, and saw Manwë stare back, likewise amazed. Manwë held his shield-hand to his brow—he had come helmed, and winged, girt to bear up under Melkor’s glance as under the blow from a sword. But he straightened and let fall the shield.

How changed was this enemy! Not greater, but great. Not fiercer, but here: he had sent the sea before him, and baleful stars, and Yavanna’s root-barbs, and the panting winds, and then after all he had come. That was his tread which cleared the frost from stone; that was his hand which leaned upon the staff; and he was little but a body and the force in that body, nothing but a power less than that in Melkor’s left hand—and Melkor felt his hand close, his heart melt, fear sweeping through the channel which was made in him for fear: it was the first time he had ever felt such a bitter, knowing terror, that brimmed up at the banks of him and yet promised to rise. 

“—thou to grow less!” said Manwë, wondering. “ _Thou_!”

But who heard him? For Melkor went seeking the strength of his arms, and the fire he had wielded, before sky’s stone was laid; and in all things he found that fire guttering, beset. Worse: it ate whatever it could. The fire he had thought his self—his power burned in it. Manwë crowed, and Melkor heard him—only Melkor, king under the earth.

He found his knees were weak. Shall I repent? he said to flesh, thinking to goad it by his mockery. And he also thought, Shall I repent? As if holding the brand against his heart, as if driving his flesh down on a glede, he thought how he might put aside his crown, and be made whole. It must be swift—now—Now! He plucked away the brand: I will not. It is too hard a sacrifice, and may be saved a longer while. Then: Never mind, for it is too late. And straightaway his skin began to burn, released from heat. 

Ashamed, he had a thought, and would have laughed, had no one been at hand to overhear.

Then he knelt. His knees, striking the flags, rang out as hammers. Tulkas walked to stand beside Manwë, dragging the long chain; Melkor never turned to him. Manwë said, “Do you ask pardon?”, with eyes narrowed, mouth spreading wide—a hawk after the lure.


	14. Dirhavel tackles Túrin's death

“Then Túrin fled and slew himself by the banks of the Taeglin, at Cabed-en-Aras.” No!

He had been found with his sword broken under him. That spoke of the force with which he had flung himself down. He had thrown himself on his sword a step from the gorge where his sister died: what did that say? He would not follow her, he would not seek her in death, he would never find her. He was unlike Brandir, who dreamed of shaking free of an end.

So he must have taken thought, before he died, of what was proper: he must have stopped and stood there at the edge. What would he have glimpsed from that vantage—the pain in his hand so dulled that blinding tears no longer started from his eyes when he gripped his shoulder? Neither would he have wept before Mablung. Yes, so his eyes were clear. Then indeed he saw the cliff and the far shore, though not the river, spilling swift and narrow over stones at the foot of the gorge; but he would have heard the river, and seen the trees that were prey of Glaurung—all around he would have had the falling of dry leaves. Some trees were burned to stumps, but many more had suffered in the heat, that long night while the dragon died, Niënor died, and Túrin slept. Winter again, brought to bear by fire: the ash blowing like hot erratic snow. Pity the man who drew his comfort from that stricken land, and had come to know himself in a mist and smoke that rose off his enemy’s shape, or it was the white fog of morning. But he was Túrin, and he was awake. Suppose he said to the river: Not I. Then had he cast himself upon his sword?

Terrible to think of him, alone and proud. He would not have laughed after leaving Mablung, for Niënor was dead, but how to prevent him from laughing?—Túrin, who had slain the worm? Let him be checked, then, in his empty pride; let something bind him, for a little while, to the courtesy and meekness of long custom, though it too was hollow. He took out the sword. Ah! the sword, Beleg’s gift, black and hard and moon-edged as the river from a height. Here was a gift deserving of courtesy. If Túrin spoke to the river, he would be no slower to greet the reforged blade—Hail, Gurthang, _iron of death_ (he can’t lose the name, _Gurthang_ , and its evil magic; no more can he forgo meaning, for the younger listeners, refugees with no word of Sindarin; he translates as he goes, and it maddens him, no two words are the same; in elves’ ears a grievous tale, and for men—), you alone now remain. (That was right; for in hewing down Brandir and escaping Mablung he abandoned his last friends, as he once sloughed away Beleg, Finduilas, Gwindor, and Morwen: but if he hoped to get free, he had failed; there remained death and the hand that wielded it, his companions ever.) —But what lord or loyalty do you know, save the hand that wields you? (Gurthang will not contest him; so Túrin, wishing to be restrained, is grieved, and yet sounds mocking; a fault he has often displayed in better contexts. Good.) From no blood will you shrink. (To the sword, or the hand?) Will you take Turin Turambar? Will you slay me swiftly?

It needs more than that—it needs an answer, so as not to make pathetic his civility. The sword is an elvish sword, let it speak. What would it say?

“Yes, I will slay thee—” no, “I will drink your blood,” good, not shrinking but drinking, “that I may forget the blood of Beleg my master, and the blood of Brandir slain unjustly.” Not only can the sword speak, but it remembers. “I will slay you swiftly.” In such haste did Túrin cast himself on the point, so heavy was his great heart, and so wasted the blade by Glaurung’s burning venom, that iron snapped, brittle as the wood of blighted trees. Very well. But what more did the shattered sword recall? Not the Dragon-helm, or the great yew-bow of Beleg, but the knife Túrin gave Sador, replaced in time by folding-blades given him by the elves, to whittle with; and of his craft had come shaved wood and kindling. That child, frowning, striking awry—the image rises up like a hound in hunger, dancing for a scrap. Before now he wrote: “he was slow to learn his own strength”; but indeed he must have found it out by marring, not making—when first he split the branch he meant to peel, he would have guessed how strong he was. Have a care for the child, then, who learned. 

“Then they lifted up Turin, and saw that his sword was broken asunder. So passed all that he possessed.”


End file.
